world

Trump’s behavior raises questions of competency

Donald Trump potentially has millions of lives in his hands as the threat of a devastating war with North Korea swiftly escalates.

January 20, 2017

Yet the President of the United States is raising new questions about his temperament, his judgment and his understanding of the resonance of his global voice and the gravity of his role with a wild sequence of insults, inflammatory tweets and bizarre comments.

On Wednesday Trump caused outrage and sparked fears of violent reprisals against Americans and US interests overseas by retweeting graphic anti-Muslim videos by an extreme far right British hate group. Earlier this week he used a racial slur in front of Native American war heroes. He’s attacked global press freedom, after cozying up to autocrats on his recent Asia tour.

August 18 2017

And now there are reports that the President has revived conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and is suggesting an “Access Hollywood” video on which he was heard boasting sexually assaulting women, and for which he apologized last year, had been doctored.

In normal times, it would be a concern that the President is conducting himself in a manner so at odds with the decorum and propriety associated for over two centuries with the office he holds.

September 20, 2017

But the sudden escalation of the North Korean crisis, following the Stalinist state’s launch of its most potent ever missile on Tuesday, takes the world across a dangerous threshold.

If diplomacy is unable to defuse the North Korea crisis, or slow its march to the moment when Kim Jong Un can credibly claim to be able to target all of the United States with a nuclear payload, Trump will face one of the most intricate dilemmas of any modern President. Will he live with the threat posed by a mercurial, wildly unpredictable adversary? Or, will he launch what could turn out to be a hugely bloody and destructive war to remove Kim’s nuclear threat?

November 3, 2017

There will be a premium on Trump’s judgment, his capacity to absorb the most serious detail and to make choices that could put many, many lives at risk, and draw the United States into escalating situations in Northeast Asia. Trump would be required to switch from the swaggering, untethered political persona he has been reluctant to drop as President into the role of sober statesman, unifying the nation and US allies — a switch he has rarely achieved so far in his 10 months in power.

On Wednesday, in St. Charles, Missouri, Trump stuck to his preferred name calling, again blasting Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and branding him a “sick puppy” after his White House earlier promised severe new sanctions against Pyongyang. But he didn’t elaborate on his vows to “handle” the situation. (Continued: CNN)

Trump announces U.S. will withdraw from Paris climate accord

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change.

April 11, 2017

At a news conference in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon, Trump said the accord is “very unfair to the United States.”

“In order to fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.”

Trump said his country would either renegotiate its re-entry into the Paris agreement under different terms, or participate in the creation of a whole new climate deal.

March 8, 2017

White House officials had signalled withdrawal was likely to reporters, but Trump has been known to change his mind at the last minute on major decisions, as happened recently with the NAFTA trade deal.

Abandoning the accord was one of Trump’s principal campaign pledges, but America’s allies have expressed alarm about the likely consequences.

April 20, 2017

The Paris agreement was struck in 2015 and months later, the U.S. and China jointly said they would sign off on the deal. The agreement went into effect for the U.S. in November 2016.

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has criticized Trump’s resistance to the deal, saying the U.S. president doesn’t understand the fine print of the agreement and that the process of formally withdrawing could take two to three years. (Source: CBC News)

Justin Trudeau heads to Europe for NATO and G7 summits, where Trump’s ‘fireworks’ remain an expectation

May 25, 2016

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heads to Europe this week for the NATO and G7 summits, where global leaders are trying to figure out exactly how the world works now that U.S. President Donald Trump is at the table.

The future of military alliances, the fight against climate change and even free trade all hang in the balance as the new man in the White House sits down and lets them all know his plans — or maybe not.

“Predicting what this president does would be virtually impossible,” said David Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, delivering a common answer to the question of what to expect this week.

March 25, 2014

“Fireworks would be the baseline expectation of some sort.”

On Thursday, Trump, in the midst of his first foreign trip as U.S. president, will sit down with Trudeau and other leaders at the NATO summit at the group’s new headquarters in Brussels.

On Friday and Saturday, Trudeau and Trump will be in Taormina, a resort town in Sicily, for the G7 Summit.

John Kirton, director of the G8 Research Group at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, said this smaller forum with lots of opportunities for face-to-face talks is made for someone like Trump, who professes his passion for making deals.

July 27, 2006

Kirton said he expects the talks to focus on trying to convince Trump not to go through with his pledge to back out of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, the role of China in the world and international trade.

But Kirton said the tenor of these talks might depend on how things go in Brussels. If things don’t go well at the NATO summit, the G7 meeting will have to be rapidly reconfigured into a repair job, he said. (Source: Toronto Star)

Spicer: Trump’s foreign policy is still ‘America first’

Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria on Thursday in response to Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s regime using chemical weapons on civilians early last week. Trump’s move was a decisive but perplexing action for a president who campaigned on putting America first and as a private citizen advised President Barack Obama to seek congressional approval before potentially bombing Syria, which he suggested in 2013 would result in “more debt and a possible long term conflict.”

“I think the Trump doctrine is something that he articulated throughout the campaign, which is that America’s first,” Spicer told reporters, cautioning that the U.S. won’t “become the world policeman” but will make sure the nation’s economic and security interests are protected.

Asked how to square Trump’s America-first policy with his military action targeting the airbase where U.S. intelligence believes the Syrian regime’s chemical attack originated, Spicer cast the potential proliferation of chemical weapons as a national security threat.

“I think if you recognize the threat that our country and our people face if there is a growth of use or spread of chemical weapons of mass destruction, those, the proliferation of those, the spread to other groups, is a clear danger to our country and to our people,” he said. (Source: Politico)